Little Blue and Little Yellow: Colour Mixing With Gel Baggies

Oh my goodness… Gracen has just been loving the book activities we’ve been doing with our Preschool Book Club! So much so that yesterday while she was happily engaged in an activity not based on a book, she stopped suddenly and announced, ‘I know what this activity needs! A book to go with it!!’ Then she ran to the shelf, sorted through to find a story that coordinated with the project, and brought it over, declaring, ‘Now that’s better!’ Hah!

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This week’s book, Little Blue and Little Yellow, was new to Miss G, but has been a favourite teaching book of mine for years and years. The story is about Little Blue and Little Yellow, best friends and neighbours, who one day hug so hard that they both become green! Of course this causes all sorts of problems when they try to return home later in the day and their parents don’t recognize them, but eventually the problem gets sorted and everyone learns about colour mixing in the process! Because we’ve not explored colour mixing all that much yet, this was a perfect introduction. When thinking about how to explore the concept, I thought about mixing colours with paint, water, play dough, and salt, but eventually decided on exploring colour mixing with gel baggies! They’re beautiful, inexpensive, squishy, and work great on white surfaces as well as on windows and light tables. Oh, and they’re really easy to make too.

The moment saw the food colouring out, she ran to retrieve her painting smock as she knows that they stain quite badly. It totally wasn’t necessary as the colouring was contained in the bags, but hey – better safe than sorry. What did get all over her hands, however, was the hair gel. Grae had never seen hair gel before, and was very curious about how it felt, so into the container her little hand went!

With her hands washed, it was time to create our colourful gel baggies. To do so, we simply added several scoop of hair gel to each of our 3 snack-sized bags…

And then added a little bit of food colouring to each using our toothpicks.

I zipped the bags closed really well, making sure that there was little to no air trapped inside, and then passed them to Grae to squish and mix. I reminded her that we needed to be slow and gentle with this step so that our bags didn’t accidentally pop open which she was fine with, but you could always tape the tops shut if you wanted to.

As the bags were mixed, this began to happen…

‘Look Mama, everything is all RED!’

‘Now everything is all YELLOW-Y!’

When she was done squishing and mixing our bags, they looked like this.

To start with, we set the red baggie aside and focused just on blue and yellow, as in the book. Miss G placed one on either side of her tray, and then reenacted the part of the story where little blue goes searching for little yellow, finds him, and hugs him. What did we see when they hugged? GREEN! So cool.

‘Look, Mama – it’s just like the book!!’

Then we switched things up a little. We pretended that Little Blue moved away and Little Red moved into the neighbourhood where Little Blue used to live. At this point, Grae told me that Little Yellow was feeling sad that his friend had moved away and that he really only wanted Little Blue.

Thankfully, Little Yellow eventually changed his mind and became friends with Little Red. They hugged and what did we see? Orange!

For our next switch, my sensitive girl decided that Little Blue was moving back and Little Yellow was just on vacation and would be coming back very soon. In the meantime, Little Red and Little Blue met.

They quickly became good friends, hugged, and together made purple!

Gracen was quite fascinated by all of the colours we could make with our 3 baggies and wanted to see them all at once.

This is what she tried before declaring, ‘Well that doesn’t work so well!’ Hah!

Together, we figured out that placing our baggies in a triangle allowed us to see all of the primary colours and secondary colours at once – so neat! She then proceed to explain each of the colour combinations and outcomes to me.

After exploring our gel baggies on the table for some time, we decided to try them on the window. Grae retrieved her scotch tape and placed Little Blue and Little Yellow close together.

She pressed on the bags to flatten out the gel, and the green showed even better than before!

Next it was time to add Little Red…

And what did we see? ‘A backwards rainbow!’, according to Grae.

This activity was so much fun and for now, our baggies remain taped to the window, adding a little bit of colour to the very beige world we live in. Grae wouldn’t have it any other way, and on several occasions, I’ve heard her saying ‘good morning’ or ‘goodnight’ to Little Blue, Little Yellow, and Little Red. ☺

Ready for some other fun activities to go with Little Blue and Little Yellow? Check out what our friends came up with: